


At the End

by KokoScripsit



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders Has Panic Attacks, Character Turned Into Vampire, Creativity | Roman Sanders has ADHD, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, It looks scary but it gets better, It's going to be okay, Major Character Undeath, Morally ambiguous Deceit Sanders, Non-Standard Vampire Lore, Offscreen character death, References to Ancient Epic Poetry, Trans Male Character, both of them actually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2019-11-03 16:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17881151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KokoScripsit/pseuds/KokoScripsit
Summary: As far as Virgil Devlin is concerned, his life began the summer when he was eighteen years old, the day he moved away from the small town where he grew up and found a place to live in a city where nobody knows his name. Away from it all, he can finally live honestly. He doesn't need any reminders of the time before then, and hecertainlydoesn't need his high-school classmate Roman Ortiz showing up and deadnaming him in public. But when their lives are abruptly taken away from them, Virgil and Roman have no one left to rely on but each other.





	1. Life, and the Morning After

**Author's Note:**

> This is the beginning of a vampire AU that I've been working on for a little bit. I didn't really plan to publish this part at all, conceiving of it as backstory for a larger work, but I guess we're starting from the beginning after all. Expect some angst, but also expect some fluff, because I actually love these characters and want them to be happy. By the end of this prequel piece, there will _probably_ be romance, but there's somebody else we're waiting for before that can really get going...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: deadnaming, a couple of panic attacks (plus an implied RSD attack), discussion of hangovers, implied/discussed violence, and a bad joke about literally-ancient history

Virgil didn't know what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn't one of his high-school classmates, least of all Roman Ortiz.

Roman was everything Virgil wasn't. Or, well, he had been in high school, but so far the evidence pointed to neither of them having changed much in the handful of years since graduation. Roman was always boisterous, charismatic, idealistic. He dressed in white with brightly colored accessories. Half the time he talked like he had swallowed a compendium of fairy tales. He got up on stage in front of the entire town and seemed to revel in all eyes being on him. And Virgil... Virgil was exactly the opposite.

Virgil didn't know how to get people to want to believe him, the way Roman could; all he could do to get attention was to make people afraid of his strange and creepy ways. Virgil dressed in black with the occasional dark color. Virgil cut his hair himself, short in the back and longer in the front, even though maneuvering sharp things around his own head was nerve-wrackingly difficult and before he'd gotten the hang of it he had needed to hide more than one crinicultural disaster in the hood of his sweatshirt all day for as long as it lasted. Virgil spent all of high school hiding from his life in the heavy books of ancient poetry that he carried with him everywhere. Virgil was _Arma virumque cano_ and _Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,_ far away in time and space from the life he didn't like, in a world of beautiful words and deadly battles, where he didn't have to be lonely.

He had recognized Roman immediately, and several seconds later he saw something like recognition unfold in the other's eyes. And then the other approached him and spoke the words he had been hoping never to hear again.

“Lucy? Lucy Devlin?”

Virgil froze. His heart was pounding in his ears, his peripheral vision going black and Roman’s face looking oddly far away. And then he snarled, “Don't call me that!” and bolted.

He had no idea where he was going, or how far he'd run when his vision went black completely.

vvv

Virgil woke up to the feeling of loose dirt against his cheek and a pounding in his head. He had no previous experience with hangovers, as he had always feared getting drunk enough to lose control of his own mind and had accordingly never had more than one drink in a day, but this feeling made him understand all the descriptions of hangovers he'd read, and the last thing he remembered was going out to a bar.

“How much did I _have_?” he muttered to himself, slowly peeling his hand off the ground to rub his forehead. He felt awful; in addition to the pounding in his head, he ached all over. Had he completely forgotten everything he knew, everything he'd made a point to learn before he'd had his first drink in his life? What had _happened_ last night?

Or... when was it? He opened his eyes and saw that the bare dirt underneath him was the strange silvery color of moonlight. Was it still the same night, or had he been out for a day or longer? Where was he, even?

A pained moan echoed from somewhere moderately nearby, and Virgil wondered who it was. The pain was starting to recede a little, though he still felt tired and thirsty. Was someone else out here? Someone in trouble? Someone who might know something he didn't?

From the same direction, there came a horrible whimpering noise. Virgil tried to pull himself to his feet to investigate, but his legs didn't seem to be quite ready for that yet, so he found himself on his hands and knees. Good enough, he figured, and crawled in the direction of the sounds.

The man lying on the ground looked like a stranger at first, but — incredibly — when Virgil came nearer he realized that it was Roman Ortiz, of all people. What was _he_ doing here, laying around in the dirt in the middle of the night?

“Roman?”

Roman groaned, sounding as if he were in a lot of pain. Virgil crawled over to look directly down into his face.

“What's wrong? What happened to you?”

With an incomprehensible noise, Roman opened his eyes blearily. “Who are you?” he mumbled.

“My name's Virgil. Virgil Devlin.”

For a moment, Roman looked blank, but then understanding washed over his features, together with a sort of fear that Virgil had never seen on him before. “Oh — _oh my God,_ I’m so sorry I got your name wrong!”

Virgil blinked, startled. Now that he heard that, he remembered that they had briefly met and Roman had called him by his dead name, but he hadn’t really expected Roman to care how he felt about that at all, much less _this_ much. “It’s okay,” he managed. “Just... don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t, I promise,” Roman said fervently. He started working to sit up, and Virgil sat back to give him more room.

Hoping to change the subject to something less fraught, Virgil asked his onetime classmate, “Do you remember anything about what happened... how you got here?”

Roman was quiet for a long moment, apparently thinking about it, and then his eyes went very wide. “Somebody attacked me,” he said.

Virgil started, much to the displeasure of his aching head. “Attacked you, like... how?”

Roman swallowed. “Attacked me, like grabbed me from behind and — how the hell do I not feel _worse_? I feel tired and achy but not like I’ve been _stabbed_.”

That sounded bad. Virgil looked Roman over. “You don’t look like you’ve been stabbed, either,” he noted. The man’s white shirt was slightly dirty but visibly, obviously free from cuts and bloodstains.

Frowning, Roman pulled off his shirt, revealing — dammit, so much for Virgil’s theory that Roman had only been the most attractive boy in their high school because it was so small that there was a shortage of options. He didn’t have _time_ to be gay right now, and frankly it was shocking that his brain could even spare the energy to notice how good Roman looked when he was busy feeling lousy _and_ worrying over what the hell even happened to put either of them here in the first place. But as both of them looked over Roman’s front, and Virgil peeked around at his back, the facts of the matter remained: he looked good, and he did _not_ look stabbed.

“Yeah,” Virgil reiterated, “you look like... you’re doing okay.”

“Close enough,” Roman grunted. “What about you?”

Oh, no. Virgil cast about for an answer, and produced... nothing. “I don’t remember anything after... talking to you,” he admitted. “I think I passed out somewhere? Just woke up a couple minutes ago with a hell of a hangover, but I don’t remember drinking.”

A look of concern flashed across Roman’s face. “ _Virgil_ ,” he said, very deliberately, like he was terrified of saying the word wrong. “Do you think... could someone have attacked you, too?”

There was a long moment of silence while Virgil considered it. “Maybe,” he said quietly. It was a possibility — a terrible one. All kinds of awful things that could have happened to him while he was out flashed through his mind. He would rather not think about... oops, he was thinking about it anyway. Trying to shove it out of his mind was useless, he knew from long practice —

“Virgil? _Virgil?_ Earth to Virgil, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he lied automatically, before his eyes landed on Roman’s worried face. Obviously the other young man didn’t believe him. “Okay, I just... I thought about it too hard.” The ideas were not going away, the mental images of someone knocking him out, all the ways they could have hurt him without his even knowing yet, and if he had experienced something like Roman had with waking up miraculously healed, then that meant that _nothing_ was ruled out —

“Stay with me, Visigoth.”

Virgil gave Roman an incredulous look at the nickname. “I’m sorry, _what_ did you just call me?” he wanted to know.

“Visigoth. Your name starts with a V, you used to be into ancient history, you dress all gothy—”

“Emo. My style is _emo,_ not _goth._ ”

“See, you’re _like_ a goth but not _actually_ one!”

Virgil could still feel the panic, but now he had new, less awful thoughts competing with the bad ones, and he was laughing.


	2. The First Important Question

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: slight implication of intrusive thoughts, Virgil doubts his own perception of reality for a bit, implied brief nudity, brief counterfactual about surgery, the ramifications of last chapter's events start to become visible  
> (i.e. these boys are vampires now and they're just beginning to notice as much)

The more they figured out about their current predicament, the more it didn’t make sense.

Having woken up on the ground feeling hungover and with their memories not quite lining up right was strange enough, but it only got stranger once they found a fast-food joint nearby and agreed that cleaning up and getting some food was a high priority. The lone cashier stared at them, and Virgil found himself staring right back, wanting...

He didn’t want to admit to himself what he wanted, because it felt all wrong, morally and logically both, and he had never felt such an impulse before in his life. Instead, he bolted in the direction of the bathroom, hearing Roman’s footsteps keeping pace with his. They slammed open the door to the men’s room, and once through pushed it shut and collapsed against it in shock.

“What _was_ that?” Virgil panted.

“I don’t know,” Roman replied, his voice shaking a little. And that was the moment when Virgil saw what Roman’s face looked like under the brighter fluorescent lights, without the moonlight to tint his skin silver. Their eyes met, and Roman looked... worried, much the same way Virgil felt.

Roman spoke first: “Holy shit, is that makeup or did you see a ghost?”

Virgil frowned, touching his own cheeks. “I’m not wearing a lot of makeup, just some eyeshadow... but what happened to _your_ face?”

Roman didn’t seem to understand what Virgil was saying, putting his hand to his face, both of which looked almost grayed-out despite his tan complexion. “I... don’t know?” His eyes strayed towards the sinks, and Virgil’s followed, to where the usual mirror hung on the wall.

His reflection looked worse than Virgil had expected; he’d always been pale, since it sorta came with the territory of being mostly of Irish descent, but he’d never looked this deathly white before. It was like the two of them had been moved to a different palette of colors that was more muted than the one people normally came in; they looked natural enough next to each other, but they didn’t really look like their normal selves, or like anyone else.

Virgil leaned in to look closer at his reflection, and blinked in confusion. Was something wrong with the mirror? He could have sworn that for a second he saw right _through_ himself. Glancing down at his hands, he saw without a doubt that they were as solid and opaque as anything else in the room, if also lacking in normal color. But his reflection in the mirror... the more he looked, the more apparent the tiled pattern and hand dryer on the opposite wall seemed to be, straight through his own reflected body. He looked over at Roman, who was a firmly solid presence next to him... and whose reflection, now that he really _looked_ at it, was also sort of see-through. The sinks, on the other hand, appeared as solid in the mirror as they did in reality.

That wasn’t right. Summoning up his courage, Virgil said, “Roman... does something about our reflections look... off, to you?”

“You mean _other_ than the fact that half the color went missing?” Roman asked, probably rhetorically.

“Yeah — I thought...” There Virgil's nerve failed him. He was probably hallucinating, here in the bathroom of a hamburger franchise at God-only-knew-what-hour. How embarrassing. “Never mind.” He turned away from the mirror and entered one of the bathroom stalls. He had been wearing his binder when he last remembered, and he had the feeling that it had been long enough since then that he needed to at least check. For that matter, it would be nice to —

His train of thought stopped there, because it was at that point that he’d begun to take off his clothes, and he didn’t know what to do with the sight of his own body when he saw it. “No _way,_ ” he muttered.

Evidently hearing him, Roman called, “What?” from the other side of the swinging door.

“I... this is...” Virgil quickly put his pants back on and opened the door, standing there shirtless to give Roman some idea of what he was talking about. The other man was squinting at his own reflection in the mirror, but when the door opened he turned to look at Virgil.

“Didn’t you used to...?” Roman gestured vaguely towards his own chest.

“That’s my point,” Virgil replied. “This is... not what I looked like when I got dressed.” He met Roman’s eyes. Something was very different; his body was suddenly _right_ , with no scars to suggest that he had somehow just not noticed getting surgery. His skin was too pale and too gray. His reflection in the mirror was transparent. And then there was the strange impulse he’d felt, when he’d seen the cashier. Any one of these things would have been a puzzle, but put all of them together...

“Roman... are we dead?”


	3. Illusions and Missteps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: denial, Virgil panics (which so far is par for the course), threatened/partially enacted violence, a moral dilemma

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Roman said, though he sounded less than fully convinced of his own words.

“I _know_ that,” Virgil snapped quietly. “There’s also no such thing as zombies, vampires, ghouls, revenants, or Frankenstein. They’re all stories that people made up. But _something’s_ going on that doesn’t make sense, and those stories are the closest thing to an explanation I’ve got.”

Roman frowned and looked back into the mirror at which he still stood. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, and it’s _got_ to be a trick of the light that I can see right through my reflection.”

Oh. Roman was struggling with this too, just... differently than Virgil was.

“I see it too,” Virgil told him quietly.

vvv

It turned out that they didn't have anything with them except the clothes on their backs. The things they had been carrying before they had fallen unconscious, or whatever it was — cell phones, wallets, keys — were missing entirely. Roman wanted to think this meant that they had been attacked by ordinary thieves who merely wanted their valuables and had left them to wake up afterwards. Virgil didn’t try to argue, at this point. He was more concerned with the question of, since neither of them was currently in possession of money, identification, transportation, access to their homes, or means of contacting anyone who could help them get any of those things, what were they going to do? Up until now they’d had lives, but how much of that would they be able to get back? What did people _do_ when they woke up in unfamiliar places without any of the tools they used to access their lives?

He wasn’t sure he liked Roman’s suggestion of a place to start, remembering the strange feeling he’d had on first entering the restaurant, but he didn’t try to argue with that either. Maybe Roman hadn’t felt it after all. He hoped not.

vvv

“Excuse me,” said Roman politely, “do you have the time?”

Virgil stood several feet behind him and off to the side, the hood of his black sweatshirt over his head and with his hands buried in his pockets. He wasn’t sure that trying to get useful information out of a fast-food cashier was a good idea, especially not under their uncertain circumstances, but he hoped that Roman was right that it would work.

The cashier, who appeared to be slightly younger than the two of them, squinted at him for a moment. “It’s three-twenty in the morning,” they informed Roman. “Are you going to order or not?”

“While I would love to,” Roman replied, “I’m afraid that my friend and I have no money between us, and it would be most _unseemly_ to order when we cannot pay.”

The incredulous look that the cashier gave him in response was quickly turned on Virgil with a hint of suspicion.

“Don’t mind him,” Virgil supplied. “He’s just like this.” At the offended noise Roman made in response, Virgil shrugged. “What? It's true.” His nonchalant demeanor, though, was almost entirely a façade, one that he had thrown up out of habit to hide his growing sense that something was about to go badly wrong.

It was growing and growing, fear gradually sharpening his senses and dulling his understanding. Roman was... flirting with the cashier? Leaning forward seductively...?

“ ** _Stop!_** ” Virgil yelled, his voice taking on a strange, even unnatural timbre he had never heard from anyone — least of all himself — before. In a voice like thunder, he had just _ordered_ Roman to stop...

And Roman froze where he was, bracing himself on the counter and holding the cashier pinned to it. For a moment, everything seemed to be still, as Virgil’s brain struggled to catch up with what he had just done.

And then Roman pleaded with him, saying, “Don’t you feel it?”

Virgil didn’t bother to ask what he meant. He _knew_ what Roman was doing, _wanted_ to do it himself. The same level of instinct that told him to sleep when he was tired and eat when he was hungry was pointing to the thirst and headache he’d been dealing with since he’d awoken, which were now back at the forefront of his awareness, and suggesting that if he just gave in, joined in with what his friend had started, he would feel better. And yet...

“Yes, I feel it, but you can’t just go around biting people.”

“Can’t I?” Roman asked. “This feels like something I _need_. Something _we_ need.”

Virgil ran a hand through his hair in frustration and fear. “That doesn’t make it okay to just ignore what other people need! What if you hurt them? What if you — what if—” Virgil’s throat closed before he could finish the thought. The words shut themselves off, too terrible to speak.

The human spoke up, then. “What _are_ you?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Virgil mused aloud, keeping his eyes fixed on Roman. “What _are_ we? Are we monsters?” He stepped closer. “Are we predators?” Another step. “Are we any better than whoever it was who attacked _us_?”

That got Roman’s full attention, at least, and he finally released his prisoner. Turning to look at Virgil with desperate eyes, he asked, “Then what do we do?”

Virgil swallowed. “To start with, I think we have this conversation somewhere _else_.”


	4. Where the Bodies Lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *wipes forehead* This was a hard chapter to write, which is why it took me two months. Sorry about that!
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: description of a dead body, frank talk about mortality, Virgil describes some actual real-life vampire beliefs

Somehow, they got away. Somehow, after Virgil had managed to eject something from his mouth that was intended to be an apology and might even have been intelligible as one, once Roman had miraculously recovered his suavity and offered a remarkably gracious apology of his own (and really, Virgil would _have_ to ask how he managed that sometime — not now, but only because there were more pressing issues right now), once the cashier had said that if they just left now they'd go ahead and call it even...

Somehow, after all that, Virgil and Roman ended up back where they'd awoken. It was more isolated there, a place where they could talk without worrying so much about being overheard — or tempted to hurt someone.

“So the problem is,” Virgil summarized, “we know we want to bite people, and what do we do about it?”

Roman nodded, looking troubled. “And why do we want it?”

Virgil swallowed hard. “I have a guess about that one... and I think I can test it.” He looked around, identified the patch of dirt where he'd first found Roman an hour or so ago, and started to dig.

As he'd suspected, it was pretty easy; the dirt wasn't particularly heavy, and it was both damp and loose enough that it came away readily in clumps, more like he might expect to find in somebody's garden than in the middle of an empty patch of earth.

When Virgil looked back, he saw Roman was staring at him. “You wanna help me with this?” he asked, gesturing to the ground.

“What are we going to find?” Roman rejoined hesitantly, kneeling down to do some digging himself.

“If I'm wrong? Probably tulip bulbs, but there's an off chance of buried treasure.”

Roman glared at him, taking out his obvious annoyance with the evasive answer on the dirt under his hands. “And if you're right?” 

Virgil took a deep breath, and only caught himself nervously running a hand through his hair when he felt particles of earth settling on top of his head. Quickly, he yanked his hand back down and went back to digging, albeit a little slower this time. “If I'm right—”

He was cut off mid-sentence by a truly extraordinary shrieking noise issuing from Roman. “Ohmigod what _was_ that?!”

Virgil didn’t answer, instead leaning forward to brush aside the dirt from the spot where the other had been digging, revealing what he had guessed they might find — what he had hoped they _wouldn’t_ find.

The body was unmistakably human. That much was immediately clear just from the fact that it was wearing clothes which, though torn and covered in dirt and _something_ else (Virgil didn't particularly want to think about what), were recognizable as being the same style as Roman's outfit.

“Who—?” Roman breathed.

“If I'm right,” Virgil whispered, “it's you.”

vvv

Virgil regretted that he hadn't managed to warm Roman what he thought they might find, but it had been so difficult to find the words until the reality of it was staring them in the face. How did one go about breaking such news gently, anyway? It wasn't as if there were an established protocol for it that he could fall back on. Or, well, if there was, nobody had ever told Virgil.

The injuries on the body matched the ones that Roman remembered getting, but the real proof was that they found his wallet and cell phone in a pants pocket. The phone had long since run out of battery, but other than that and the inevitable dirt, both appeared to be in decent shape. Roman stared down at his own name and face on his driver’s license for a long moment, before pulling some of the cash out and returning the wallet with the rest of its contents to where they had found it. Virgil didn’t ask.

It was Roman, in fact, who asked the next question: “So... how?”

“I have... a guess,” Virgil admitted. “I had a vampire phase in middle school—”

“You mean to say it _ended_?”

“Oh, shut up — anyway, for a while there I was reading everything about vampires I could get my hands on, and there was one book in particular that was about vampire myths from all over the world, and one of the myths, from Eastern Europe, talked about vampires that didn't have _bones_.”

“What?”

“Yeah, because they left their bones — and their bodies — in the grave. The vampires themselves were more like ghosts, made of jellied shadows.”

“ _Jellied?_ ”

“That was what it said! ‘These vampires do not have bones, and are made of jelly.’”

“Right.” Roman looked highly skeptical. “What else was there to know about these jelly vampires?”

“Well, they're actually the original vampires — all other vampire myths and stories picked up the name by association. There were a couple different ways that someone could become one, but the big ones were ‘living an immoral life’ — whatever that means — and being buried improperly.” He indicated the shallow, unmarked grave in front of them. It had every sign of being as far from a proper burial as one could get; it looked as if it had been conducted unceremoniously and in a hurry, and serious effort had been made to hide it from anyone who might care about the person buried in it. “But you wouldn’t know for sure if you had a vampire for at least a few hours, until the shadows began to gather on the grave. Over the next thirty nights, the shadows would gel and solidify, until you had a near-exact copy of the person, who would then wake up.”

Roman looked downright horrified at this description. “So you’re telling me that not only are we dead, we’ve _been_ dead for a _month_ now?”

“Yup,” Virgil said grimly.

“And we don’t have bones.”

“That too.”

“It’s going to take me a while to come to terms with this.”

“That’s fair.”


	5. Remembering You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: more anxiety, death talk, and dead bodies, plus MCR lyrics and a brief glimpse of Deceit

“Virgil?”

It was the first thing that Roman had said in quite some time. They had been sitting quietly, each wrestling with his own thoughts, until now. Virgil lifted his gaze from the dirt beneath his feet and cautiously met Roman's.

“Yes?”

“If we're both your ghostly jelly vampires now... what happened to _your_ body?” 

A trace of a smile crossed Virgil's face when Roman described their new status so very ineloquently, but he couldn't help looking down and frowning at the conclusion of the question.

“I don't know. I mean, I have a pretty good idea _where_ it is, but I don't know how I died, and... I don't know if I want to see the evidence.”

“Why not?”

Virgil shrugged sarcastically, if such a thing were possible. “Because I don't remember how I died? So I keep going over it in my mind, all the different things that _could_ have happened — of course none of them are _nice_ , but some of them are worse than others, you know? And I don't know if I'd want to know it, if it turns out that it was one of the worse ones.”

Roman actually thought about that for a moment, and then said, “Maybe you should look anyway. I mean, the way it is, you're having to deal with _all_ those open possibilities as things that might have happened to you. If you learn the truth, then you only have to live with the one that really did happen.”

When Roman put it that way, it sounded like he had a point. Virgil nodded slowly. “Okay. You've convinced me.”

vvv

A few minutes later, they were staring down at a second shallowly buried body — one that was in _shockingly_ good shape, all things considered. There was no sign of the sorts of violence that Virgil had been most worried about; in fact, the only visible injury on his body was a pair of puncture wounds, maybe two inches apart, along the line of the vein in the side of his throat.

Well. That implied a thing or two.

It was both a relief and unnerving to see. In addition to the pure visceral _strangeness_ of seeing his own corpse lying in the ground, this was also strong evidence that a vampire like themselves _could_ kill someone if they weren't careful, and potentially inflict the same fate on others, and oh, Virgil didn't like that idea at all. Bad enough to be forced into this situation himself. Worse, potentially far far worse, to hurt other people the same way he had been hurt.

Roman was also staring silently at the body ( _Virgil's_ body, that was an extremely weird idea even though he'd known to expect it before he saw it), presumably lost in his own thoughts. He glanced up when he saw Virgil watching him. “This is probably the closest thing to a funeral we're going to get," Roman explained reasonably. "I feel we should recognize that.”

“How?” Virgil wanted to know.

Roman didn't answer, but instead returned his gaze to the body and began tapping his fingers against his thigh, as if counting something. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing.

“ _When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see a marching band..._ ”

Virgil's jaw dropped, and he stared, shocked, at the other man.

“ _He said, ‘Son, when you grow up, will you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?’_ ”

Virgil had never imagined that Roman would know this song at all, much less so perfectly that he could hit every note and never miss or stumble on a word. And yet, as he began to sing along, their voices blended smoothly together and it felt like they were doing the right thing.

On the repeat of the first couple lines, Roman surprised Virgil again by dropping down into a harmony line rather than going up to sing the melody in the higher key. Virgil hadn't realized that Roman even knew _how_ to sing harmony, much less that he would do it spontaneously. He'd always seemed so much more inclined to be the leading man, to steal the spotlight himself rather than willingly give it away...

Maybe Roman had changed since high school. Or maybe Virgil had misjudged him all along.

Either way, the two of them got caught up in the song, letting the music express their confusion and grief, letting it show them hope through defiance. It was all they had, but for this one moment, it was enough to sing to themselves and each other about carrying on even in spite of death.

They made it through two verses in harmony, switching back to unison on the chorus, and it seemed so normal — insofar as it could be normal for the two of them to be singing "Welcome to the Black Parade" together over their own graves in the middle of the night — until they reached the song's bridge, and Roman sang out, _“Take a look at me, 'cause I cannot care at all!”_

And... didn't stop singing that last note, not when Virgil picked up the next line, not all the way through the next entire stanza, not until the lengthy bridge was almost ending.

Which meant that Virgil was singing solo on lines that meant a great deal to him.

“ _I'm just a_ ** _man_** _, I'm not a hero; I'm just a_ **_boy_** _who had to sing this song. I'm just a_ ** _man_** _, I'm not a hero_ —”

And _that_ was when Roman finally joined back in, on the defiant “ _I — DON'T — CARE!_ ” that took them back into the chorus.

As they let the last notes fade away at the end of the song, Virgil sank slowly to the ground, tired more from the emotional catharsis than from any physical effort. He hadn't been the one to hold that incredible note, after all.

“Are you all right?” Roman asked, reaching towards Virgil's face. Though they didn't make contact, Virgil realized at that moment that there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.

“I think so,” he managed. “Just... that was a lot, and it would have been so different if my family had tried to give me a _real_ funeral...”

Roman looked... something. Troubled? Confused? Maybe some of each? “What do you mean, 'tried'?”

Virgil sighed. “I mean... I feel like the person they would have been remembering wouldn't be _me,_ it would be some — some imaginary friend they made up, and anything in common with me would be a coincidence.” He tried, and failed, to scrub the tears out of his eyes. “But instead here we are, and I know you but I don't _know_ you and before all this I wasn't even sure you knew I existed, and yet... I feel like my life mattered.”

He hadn’t necessarily meant to say so much; it had all just tumbled out. But Roman was looking at him like...

Like it mattered how he felt. Like it hurt to see him hurting. Maybe even like he deserved better.

“I'm sorry you had to live with that,” Roman said. “But you're my friend now. We're in this together. And you've _always_ mattered.”

Virgil opened his mouth to reply, unsure what he was going to say — what _did_ one say to such a declaration? — but he was cut off by a strange noise, something like a gasp, from some distance behind him. Turning, he saw the unfamiliar figure of a man, not too far in age from himself and probably a little shorter, standing just inside the alleyway between two of the buildings that ringed this empty lot. The man's face was largely in shadow, not helped by the black bowler hat tipped low over his forehead, but Virgil could tell nonetheless that there was something odd about his skin on the left side of his face. He was dressed like he belonged in a previous century. And he was staring at Roman and Virgil with a look of open horror.

A single word, emphatically whispered, drifted across the space from the stranger...

“ _Dammit!_ ”


End file.
